MUSIC REVIEW : The Sound of Trumpets at the Bowl

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, ever eager to brave new cultural frontiers, couldn’t muster 76 trombones for the concert at Hollywood Bowl on Thursday.

But the management did come up with seven--count ‘em, seven--trumpets.

Why?

Don’t ask your faithful, ever-befuddled scribe.

The rather strange, rather vacuous, evening began with the entire orchestra assembled on stage for the national anthem as conducted by David Zinman, the accommodating guest-maestro from Baltimore. However, the Banner ritual was dispatched, con brio, by only the seven tootling soloists, their efforts occasionally punctuated by a dauntless drum-roller.

After that, a third of the Philharmonic ensemble dutifully marched off stage so a modest Mozartean configuration could get on with the throat-clearing business of the “Prague” Symphony.

The logistics proved confusing. The performance proved more notable for clarity than for charm.

Then it was trumpet time again. Hakan Hardenberger, the Swedish virtuoso, served as splendid protagonist for the Philharmonic premiere of Henri Tomasi’s Concerto of 1949, a sticky and dated melange of jazzy indulgence, movie-music pap and mock-Stravinsky pretense. With luck, it will turn out to have been the Philharmonic derniere.

Intermission followed this anticlimax, after which the orchestra got another rest. The assembled trumpeters offered some crisp but inconsequential, eminently contrapuntal blasting on their own.

In the modest flourishes of Heinrich Biber’s Sonata (1668), Hardenberger was joined by a quartet of Philharmonic stalwarts--Thomas Stevens, Donald Green, Rob Roy McGregor and Boyde Hood--plus a stellar guest: Doc Severinsen.

The Generalmusikdirektor of Johann Carson’s “Tonight Schau” also participated in the flamboyant Baroque exercises of Johann Ernst Altenburg’s Concerto for seven trumpets (1795), which required the additional services of Irving Bush. In both chamber-music excursions, Zinman beat time efficiently, Mitchell Peters thumped the timpani deftly and Zita Carno provided discreet continuo support on a portable organ.

And what did this so-called trumpet summit have to do with a symphony concert?

Nothing.

How did it project in a 18,000-seat amphitheater (with 9,097 in attendance)?

Meekly.

The underemployed orchestra got to mutter the last word, and not exactly a strenuous one, with Richard Strauss’ short-winded and now-hackneyed “Till Eulenspiegel.”

The playing was fine. The amplification system cooperated splendidly. Zinman, ever efficient, conducted like a man who wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

One couldn’t blame him.